Hello Papuass, and welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

Hi! I just want to thank you and give you this barnstar for your help with the translation of the 2011 fundraiser! The fundraiser was the best we ever had, both in terms of the amount we collected and in terms of number of translations. We couldn't have done either one without the help we got from you and other translators. If you are interested, we made a report, which has some statistics about the translations.

And: I have one more request, and that is that you take this survey. You may have got an e-mail about it, and if you did, please ignore this. But if you didn't it would be great if you would take this survey too, so we can learn to improve the translation experience.

Translate some names for hundreds software projects including MediaWiki[edit]

Hello, I'm writing you because you subscribed to a Language support team. As you know, Wikimedia projects exist in almost 300 languages; supporting them all is a big effort so we partner with other organisations. One small but visible thing we miss is that many interwiki links in sidebar (among others) don't offer a translation of the language name when hovered. We're now able to translate 100 more language names in your language.

Dear Papuass, since you are an administrator on a wiki from which no user participated in this discussion, I'd like to make sure you are aware of some recent events which may alter what the Wikimedia Foundation lets you do on your wiki: Superprotect.

I am contacting You as a contact person of Latvia for the Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015 event and to announce that the second meeting for the Wikimedia CEE Spring organisation team will take place on the 28th of January 2015. There will be 2 discussion groups for the meeting, as to get as much people involved (some of us have other engagements during the daytime and others are not available during the evenings).

During the discussion both Skype call and IRC will be used. For more details see event meetings page! Wikimedia Eesti will be responsible for moderating the groups, however all contributions to the etherpad protocol are more than welcome!

I’m Alex, currently a finance fellow (i.e intern) at the Wikimedia Foundation. I worked before for Wikimedia France, planning the Hackathon Lyon 2015 mainly. I'm today contacting you because of your activity for Wikimedia Latvia User Group.

Last year, Finance Fellows produced a financial report that included financial activity from every chapters. It was great and has been presented at the Wikimania in Mexico.

We’re currently starting the Report 2014 and this year we also want to include user groups to improve the scope of our work. I want to tell you that I’ve tried to make the process as short and easy as possible, so that shouldn’t require a lot of your time.

The aim of such a report is global. It helps having an idea of how the money is used across the movement, it helps chapters and user groups to learn about best practice and finally it leads to more transparency through a qualitative work, which I believe is important.

Could you briefly tell me if you had any income and expenses in 2014? If you are not the person responsible for this, please tell me who is the user the most likely to know this information.

I’ll be your contact for this project this year, I’m looking forward to working with you!

Hello! We did not hanve any budgeted money from WMF and we do not do local fundraising. However, we did apply for a grant for WLM and worked with external partner who had a budget for the event (we did not manage finances). --Papuass (talk) 11:56, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Oh, your question was about 2014. I reported about 1015. In 2014 we did not handle any money at all. --Papuass (talk) 11:57, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

If it means what I think it does (I learned a bit of Russian), is that not considered offensive in Latvia? 94.12.84.151 11:00, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

It means one of Papuan people (hence the picture). In Russian the meaning is also is something like primitive people. However, this meaning is not used very widely in Latvian language (which is my mother tongue, not Russian). Of course, I was fully aware of it while choosing the username. Call it a self-deprecation. --Papuass (talk) 11:32, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

step 2 local organizers send scan of the invoice to one of the international organizers (natalia.szafran@wikimedia.pl or nikola.kalchev@gmail.com) along with a protocol of the process of selection of winners and with a calculation of overall costs. The protocol must include actual names of the winners (the names will not be made public, they will be kept only in documents of Wikimedia Polska). The e-mail should also include data needed to make a bank transfer (bank account number and name of the account owner)

step 3 Wikimedia Poland will reimburse the money within two weeks after receiving all the documents needed

This way of buying the prizes is strongly advised. In case it is impossible the prizes can be bought by Wikimedia Polska from the suggested online shop. In this case you need to send to one of the international organizers (natalia.szafran@wikimedia.pl or nikola.kalchev@gmail.com) an email with links to the prizes in an online shop, a protocol of the proces of selection of winners (containing their actual names and usernames). After the purchase is done Wikimedia Polska needs to get an email containing some kind of proof that the prizes have reached the winners (postage waybill scan for instance or a scan of a declartion that the prize has been handed over, the declaration must be signed by the winner).

Please keep in mind that whenever possible local coordinators should buy the prizes themselves. Wikimedia Polska will buy them only in those cases when it is absolutely necessary.
All documents must be sent to Wikimedia Poland by the end of June.

Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us. Me and Nikola will be happy to guide you through the process and make it as easy as possible. And thank you for being a part of CEE Spring and organizing this awesome project in your community. Magalia (talk) 21:50, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

You’re getting this message because you participated in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey and we want to make sure you don't miss it this year – or at least can make the conscious choice to ignore if it you want to. The 2015 survey decided what the Community Tech team should work on during 2016. It was also the focus of Wikimedia hackathons and work by other developers. You can see the status of wishes from the 2015 wishlist at 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results.

Hi Papuass, I saw that you translated and updated the #1lib1ref campaign page for Latvian. I wanted to reach out to you, and ask if you needed any help organizing the campaign. We recommend that communities, reach out directly to the library networks in your language and cultural context. For more information, about how we hope to support campaign development, please see this starter email for the campaign organizers, and let me know if we can help you on any of those steps.Astinson (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Astinson (WMF)! I was planning to reach out to my existing contacts, but have not done it yet. --Papuass (talk) 20:19, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Sending an email to library networks seems to work well globally. Here is a draft email we have been sending around: via Google Drive

Thanks! I see that the first link is a really basic instruction on how to implement ref tags. Do you have any other instructions (such as when it is appropriate to add a reference, etc? If not, we can definitely use that first one. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Papuass, just one last question: is there any special policy for omitting references in the lead section, such as enwiki's WP:CITELEAD? If so, can you please provide a link to it? We usually display a notice about that in Citation Hunt, like so: https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/en?id=8976a0d6. This is totally optional if no such policy exists in lvwiki. Thanks! Surlycyborg (talk)

There is no such policy enforced or even formally defined. --Papuass (talk) 21:18, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Dear Mārtiņš, On behalf of the Programme Committee of the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017, I am pleased to inform you that your submission Current state of Wikidata powered infoboxes was approved for presentation and was included in the event programme. Please take your time to review the schedule, as there might be some slight differences between the available timeslot allocated for your talk, and the duration you requested. Thank you for your participation, and see you in Warsaw. :) Bests, →Spiritia 14:27, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

It was clarified that this effort will help deal not only with impersonation of specific Wikipedians but also claims of being in good standing made by those who are not.[1]
Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:59, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

The event lasts a month for the participants. As of the beginning of the event, please:

Invite previous participants to join. We have a template you may want to use.

Setup your WAM page in your local wikiproject if you haven’t done that.

Link your WAM page at Wikipedia Asian Month 2017. It’s important for others to understand and connect to your community! Remove the X when you done that. WAM is organized at national level. So I have to ask you to put your country in front of your name if you haven’t done that.

Publish a notification about WAM in site notice as well as village pump. Go public!

Connect with us. Generally send me an email so that we can reach you for future information!

Become the jury member in a campaign on Fountain which is an amazing tool for you to supervise participants’ articles. If you don’t have the campaign set up, please contact us! And put a link to your community’s campaign page for participants’ navigation.

Organize a off-site editathon event. A coffee bar, internet and laptops. Though it’s optional. If you want to do that, please contact me.

In the following days, you should answer the questions from your community and supervise the submissions. Hope you have fun!

The wording when you send a thanks message has changed. Instead of Yes or No it says Thank and Cancel. It is also now easier to understand that all thanks are public. [27]

A notification is now sent to account owner on multiple unsuccessful login attempts. [28]

Problems

Between week 7 and 20 February, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [29]

Long page titles on Special:Notifications were not truncated. This is now fixed. [30]

It was not possible to opt-in and opt-out Structured discussions on wikis using it as a Beta feature. It is now fixed. [39]

Future changes

The visual editor and 2017 wikitext editor interface is going to change for consistency. The toolbar, dialogs and menus will appear slightly bigger; some icons will look different. Content or functionality will not change. That change will apply to Structured Discussions as well. [40]

Hi Papuass, I’m a product manager at the Wikimiedia Foundation. My team's next assignment is to design and build a tool that will make life easier for people who organize and run editathons. (Here's the project page).

I’m reaching out people known to organize editathons to learn more about your process and needs. I’d like to better understand where you most need help and what changes you’d like to see. If that sounds interesting to you, I’d I’d like to set up a time when we might chat via video conference (Google Hangouts).

If you’d like to talk, please send me a contact email where I can reach you and I’ll be in touch. You can reach me here: jmatazzoni[at]wikimedia.org. You might also wish to let me know what time zone you’re in (I’m in California time).

The Collaboration team doesn't longer exists. That team was working on building features that encourage collaboration. This is the latest message for that newsletter.

The Growth Team, formed in July 2018, supports some former Collaboration projects. The Growth Team's main objective is to ease new editors' first steps on wikis, through software changes. You can discover all objectives and missions of the Growth team on its page.

If you wish to be informed about Growth team's updates about easing new users first steps, you can subscribe to the new list to get updates. The first message from Growth –with a call for feedback on a new project– will be posted in a few days!

If you have questions or you want to share experiences made on your wiki about new users' first steps, please post them on the team talk page, in any language.

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects. We will be starting with Wikipedias, but we hope these changes will benefit every community.

8 ideas we consider: tell us what you think about them!

We are considering new features to build, that could retain new editors in mid-size Wikipedias. We will be testing new ideas in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, and then we'll talk to more communities (yours!) about adopting the ideas that work well.

We want to hear about what is working and what is not working for new contributors in your wiki. We also want to hear any reactions, questions, or opinions on our work. Please post on the team’s talk page, in any language!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the first project we'll work on.

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Our plan for the next quarter is ready

After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:

Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.

Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.

Focus on help desk: we plan to invite or redirect people to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

You get this message because you’ve previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey. I just wanted to let you know that this year’s survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until 11 November: Community Wishlist Survey 2019.

You can vote from November 16 to November 30. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won’t send out a separate reminder to you about that. /Johan (WMF) 11:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Two Growth team projects to be deployed in next two weeks

We will be deploying the "Understanding first day" and "Personalized first day" projects on Czech and Korean Wikipedias in the coming weeks. See the new project pages below for full details on the projects, and our project updates page for their progress.

Understanding first day: learn about the actions new editors take right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.

Personalized first day: learn about new editors' objectives by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process, and personalizing their onboarding. We hope to share initial results in December.

Third Growth team project begins

Focus on help desk: direct newcomers to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

Best practices for helping newcomers

We are going to direct newcomers to help desks. But what's the best way to reply to a newcomer there? We have gathered some best practices for successful interactions, based on community experiences and some external documentation. The page has also been reviewed by some experienced community members who suggested some changes. That page is now open for translations. Comments and suggestions are still welcome!

Hi Papuass. I'd like to invite you to participate in usability tests we're planning for the Event Metrics program now in development. The test will involve a one-hour video conference session with a design researchers, who will lead you through a series of tasks on the program and talk to you about how well the tool's user interface works for you and how it could be improved. Sessions will take place the second and third weeks of January.

If you think you can help out, please email Daisy Chen at dchen[at]wikimedia.org and let her know:

The email address where you prefer to be reached.

Your time zone

General times when you prefer to meet (evenings, mornings, etc.)

Daisy will follow up to schedule a time. Thanks for your help in making Event Metrics a tool that event organizers will find empowering. —JMatazzoni (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

The survey is now being shown to half of new users (A/B test). Responses are being recorded in the database. We'll report on initial results during December.

We are planning to test a second version of the survey, called "Variation C", which we think will maximize the number of users who complete the survey and stay on the wiki.

The original objective of this project was to give newcomers the materials they need to achieve their goals, and so now we are currently planning how we will use the information collected in the welcome survey to personalize the newcomer's experience. We hope community members will read our current thinking and join the conversation here. Some of the plans we are considering include:

Making it easy for newcomers to see editing activity around the topic areas in which they indicated that they're interested.

Connecting interested newcomers to experienced editors.

Surfacing the help content most relevant to the reason for which the newcomers created their accounts.

Understanding first day (EditorJourney) was deployed on November 15 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias. It has been done after a longer security review and final testing than expected. Data is now being recorded for all new users on those wikis, and we've been auditing the data and preparing to make initial reports during December. Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

Help panel is under construction

Focus on help desk (help panel) is planned to be deployed during the week of January 7 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.

In addition to giving the ability to ask a question, the help panel will also contain a set of links to existing help content. Our ambassadors on Czech and Korean Wikipedias are determining the right initial set of most helpful links in this task.

We began the "Personalized first day" project with the welcome survey so that we could gather information about what newcomers are trying to accomplish. The next step is to use that information to create experiences that help the newcomers accomplish their goal – actually personalizing their first day. We asked for community thoughts in the previous newsletter, and after discussing with community members and amongst our team, we are now planning two projects as next steps: "engagement emails" and "newcomer homepage".

Engagement emails: this project was first discussed positively by community members here back in September 2018, and the team how has bandwidth to pursue it. The idea is that newcomers who leave the wiki don't get encouraged to return to the wiki and edit. We can engage them through emails that send them the specific information they need to be successful – such as contact from a mentor, the impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

Newcomer homepage: we developed the idea for this project after analyzing the data from the welcome survey and EditorJourney datasets. We saw that many newcomers seem to be looking for a place to get started – a place that collects their past work, options for future work, and ways to learn more. We can build this place, and it can connect to the engagement emails. The content of both could be guided by what newcomers say they need during their welcome survey, and contain things like contact from a mentor, impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

We have published initial reports on each of the team's first two projects. These reports give the basic numbers from each project, and there are many more questions we will continue to answer in future reports. We're excited about these initial findings. They have already helped us define and design parts of our future projects.

The help panel was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on January 10. Over the past four weeks:

About 400 newcomers in each wiki have seen the help panel button.

About 20% of them open up the help panel.

About 50% of those who open it up click on one of the links.

About 5% of Czech users ask questions, and about 1% of Korean users ask questions.

We think that the 20% open rate and 50% click rate are strong numbers, showing that a lot of people are looking for help, and many want to help themselves by looking at help pages. The somewhat lower numbers of asking questions (especially in Korean Wikipedia) has caused us to consider new features to allow people to help themselves. We're going to be adding a search bar to the help panel next, which will allow users to type a search that only looks for pages in the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

The Growth team has been working on features to increase new editor retention for the last seven months. We have made a lot of progress and learned a lot, and we've just finished planning for our next three months. During the next three months, we're going to focus on iterations of the help panel and the newcomer homepage. We have decided not to start the engagement emails project, because we think that we will be able to do better work by improving the projects we have already started. Specifically, these are our team goals:

The newcomer homepage is our current major project. We hope that community members can read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. You can see in the accompanying mockup how we are thinking about the homepage.

We have recently decided on the specifications for an initial version that we can deploy and iterate on:

Shown in the User space

Desktop only (mobile comes next)

Four modules

Help module: help links and ability to ask help desk questions

Mentorship module: all newcomers assigned a mentor to whom they can ask questions

Impact module: shows the number of pageviews for pages the newcomer edited

Account completion module: gives some very simple recommendations of how to get started (add an email, start your user page)

Layout not yet personalized for each user

We're currently running live user tests on this configuration. Future work will include adapting the homepage for mobile, working on a task recommendation module, and considering how to encourage newcomers to visit their homepage.

Screenshot from Vietnamese Wikipedia showing the help panel open on the Community Portal, including the "search" bar.

During the last month, the help panel was deployed on Vietnamese Wikipedia, adding it to Czech and Korean Wikipedias.As of 2019-03-14:

2,425 newcomers have seen the help panel

422 of them have opened it

175 have clicked links

27 have run searches

40 have asked questions

We have been analyzing the data around usage, and we'll be publishing numbers in the coming weeks. At a high level, we see at least some users are being helped by the panel, with many clicking on links, running searches, and asking questions. We do not yet see any problems that have arisen from the help panel. Therefore, we think that the help panel is generally a positive feature – though data is still coming that will allow us to see its numerical impact. If other wikis are interested in using the help panel, please contact us on our team's talk page, in the language of your choice.

Over the past month, we have iterated on the help panel to take into account the usage patterns we are seeing. You can see in the accompanying image how the help panel currently looks.

We added a search capability, in which users can search the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

The help panel was previously available whenever a newcomer was in "edit" mode. We are now also showing the help panel when a newcomer is in "read" mode on a page in the Help, Wikipedia, or User namespaces.

We want to see whether users find the "search" useful. If so, we may spend time on improving search results. We're also looking forward to learning whether exposing the help panel in "read" mode in more namespaces will increase usage.￼

The main feature that the team has been working on over the last month is the newcomer homepage. This feature gives newcomers a place on the wiki to get oriented, learn about editing, and see their impact (see the accompanying screenshot from Test Wikipedia). We intend to release this feature to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias on May 2nd.

Like the other Growth team features, this will be deployed in a controlled experiment, in which half of newcomers will have access to their homepage and half will not. Users with the feature will be able to access it by clicking their username at the top of their browser, and it will only be available on desktop -- not mobile. Experienced users who want to see their homepage will be able to turn it on in their preferences.

Wikis receiving the newcomer homepage can expect these things:

Additional questions will come to the help desk from the "help module" on the homepage.

Mentors who have signed up for the "mentorship module" will start to receive questions on their user talk pages.

The most important piece developed for the homepage over the last month is the "start module", which gives newcomers clear actions to take when they are new: add/confirm their email, go through a tutorial, start their user page. We learned about the need for this module from user tests last month. The next priorities for the newcomer homepage are:

Mobile design: to work well in mobile browsers, the homepage needs a separate design and engineering. See the accompanying mockups for potential mobile designs.

Features for discovery: only about 15% - 30% of newcomers will discover their homepage by clicking their username at the top of their browser. We are going to be designing additional ways for newcomers to find out about it.

Additional modules: the initial version contains some of the simpler modules. Potential upcoming modules include task recommendations and a feed of activity on the wiki.

Help panel leading indicators: our team published data on the help panel's initial performance. The evaluation exposes some areas for improvement, but we think the help panel's behavior so far is healthy and that it is not having a negative impact on the wikis. We will be publishing additional data, making plans, and asking for community thoughts around the future of the help panel over the course of the next two weeks. If you are interested in trying out the help panel on your wiki, please let us know on our team's talk page.

Long term plans: the team had a week of planning meetings, in which we talked about some longer-term ideas for Growth work. Some of the top ideas are: to extend the newcomer homepage to help user's build their identity through a user profile, and to revisit the "engagement emails" project that the team put on hold. Over the next month, we will be asking for community conversation around how the team can spend our time in the next fiscal year, that starts in July.

Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019[edit]

Welcome to a special newsletter from the Growth team! This special newsletter is not about Wikimedia Foundation Growth team projects. Instead, it is a call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We think that many people who receive this newsletter may have something valuable to contribute to this space at Wikimania. We haven't translated the newsletter, because Wikimania's language is English.

Since you are interested b Growth team projects, and potentially involved in welcoming newcomers initiatives on your wiki, we would like to invite you to submit a proposal to the Community Growth space because of the actions you’ve done around newcomers on wikis. The deadline for submission is June 1. See below for Community Growth submission topics and session formats. Topics and sessions have to be in English.

In the Community Growth space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:

What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?

How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?

How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?

Recommended topics: please see this link for the list for the list of recommended topics. If you do not plan to submit a proposal, you can also suggest additional topics here. If your topic does not fit into our space, remember that there are 18 other spaces that could welcome you sharing your knowledge and perspective.

Types of session. We prefer sessions that are participatory, interactive, promote conversations, and give a voice to parts of our movement that are heard less often. Please see this link for the list of recommended session formats.

Poster submissions. Posters are also a good way to introduce a topic, or show some results of an action. Please consider submitting one!

More information about the Community Growth space, topics, and submission formats is available on the proposal page.